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And strangely, when Robert was very small, we wouldn't allow him to have toy guns until we finally came to grips with the fact that it didn't matter. He and his friends just used sticks and other gunish objects instead. Yes, he did take a gun safety class at Webb, taught by Imre Lagler I believe, and probably asked for the guns in his room after that. I can't believe how cavalier we were about it. It simply seemed normal and okay.

I remember when <strike>my dad</strike> I suggested <strike>I</strike> my son take a hatchet to school for show and tell, never thinking twice about what the school would think.

<strike>Ah. Innocent times.</strike> I'm for sure going to get sent to jail one of these days.

I grew up in a community where guns were commonplace and graduated high school the year of Columbine. Until then, it never occurred to me -- or, I would bet, to many of the adults in my community -- to be worried about a shooting at school. Such high profile shootings increase fear, and I think fear can incite panic and paranoia that creates a breeding ground for more bad things to happen.

I know that seems simplistic, and but think about the increasing number of kids -- and adults -- on meds for anxiety and depression. Some of those drugs have been shown to increase suicidal thoughts in kids. Meanwhile, our culture and economic model has changed, so many families live isolated in large suburban communities.

Pervasive violence in TV and video games I think has some effect-- either by creating the misimpression that the world is more violent than it really is (thus creating unnecessary fear) or the world really is more violent and TV and video games are a contributing factor to the increasing violence through desensitization to / glamorization of violence.

I grew up in a house with all sorts of guns--my dad is a retired cop, as well as an avid hunter, and we had an array of handguns, rifles and shotguns in the house.  Like you, my brothers and I grew up in the 80's, and it really was not a big deal that we had guns in the house (although they were locked up), and I don't think any of our playmate's parents ever asked or seemed ruffled by the fact (maybe because my dad was a cop?), and we grew up in suburban Massachusetts, of all places!  Indeed my brothers and their friends would frequently "play army" and run around the neighborhood with fake guns and camoflage outfits, and no one seemed alarmed in the least.  But really, we were taught to respect, if not fear, the guns in our house, and in fact to this day I've never even touched a gun.  Even my brothers, with all of their gun play, did not fool around when it came to the real thing.

I think part of what may have had an impact is that with all of the uber violent, hyper-realistic video games, television and movies out there today, kids are far more desensitized to violence now than ever before.  It seems to me that if even the "best" kids can spend hours playing games like Grand Theft Auto, where the player is encouraged to literally blow the heads of people walking down the street for fun, is it really that much of a stretch to imagine that such a kid can and will take a gun off the wall or out of the gun cabinet to try to solve his problems, or even just to experiment a little?  The thing that worries me about all of this is that what if, in their still developing minds, the lines are understandably a little blurred between the pixels on the screen and reality for some young people?  That's why I fear letting my kids have unfettered access to the real thing, no matter how responsible the kids are or how well they've been taught about gun safety. (FN: my dad now keeps his guns locked up, far away from little grandkids hands).

I don't know. Obviously the school-shooting phenomenon is a relatively recent one, but unlocked guns being dangerous isn't new. When I was in middle school, about 25 years ago, a kid accidentally shot and killed his best friend when they were playing with the kid's dad's gun. And I remember even before that hearing a lot of other cases of accidental shootings. None of those things seem as dramatic as something like Columbine, obviously, but a lot more kids over the years have died in that kind of incident than have died in school shootings. So I think there would have been good reason then to be freaked out about unlocked guns in proximity to kids, just like there's good reason now.

The innocence of that photo makes me giggle. It can't believe it was only 25 years ago, but in that short time, our culture really has changed.

It also has to do with the continuing p*ssification of America, and American boys, in particular. Nothing can be made 100% safe.

The difference was sheer luck.  26 years ago, when I was 11, one of my classmates went to visit family over summer vacation and never came back.  Robert was accidentally shot to death by a cousin while they were playing with guns.  In my last conversation with him, he tried to convince me that he had already seen Return of the Jedi and all sorts of outlandish things happen in the movie.  I still think about that conversation on a regular basis.

I wonder what is different as well and when guns where bestowed a soul and became evil. When I was in Junior High, all the boys had a Buck Knife on their belt--no one ever thought about stabbing anyone. In high school, a large number of the trucks in the parking lot had rifle racks with shotguns in them. No one ever thought about stealing them, let alone shooting someone at school with them. Guns simply were not an issue. Now people pee their pants if they see one.

I grew up watching my dad make his own bullets. He went to the shooting range often, and hunted from time to time. There's the crazy story about on of my brothers shooting a gun in our old basement and nearly blowing up the cabinet where my dad's bullet supplies were kept (and also nearly blowing up the house by extension.) I also lost a family member in a gun accident. I think accidents have always happened, but in our age of immediate media access to tragedies, they are more widely reported on.

Most of your commenters are off the mark.  Both accidental shootings and homicides-at-school are down, in fact the nationwide figures for the year of the Columbine shooting were down despite the large number of fatalities in that event.

Nancy, though, does point to at least part of the issue: media sensationalism.

My children, now 16 (son) and 20 (daughter) have had access to all kinds of guns all of their lives, starting as early as they showed an interest.  They both fired guns at age two.  The guns have always been locked up to prevent tragic accidents, but they were always made available at a moments notice if there was any interest.  For awhile, they handled them under my instruction fairly frequently.  Now they know how to handle them safely and know to exit any situation where guns are being handled unsafely.

The doors to my home are always unlocked.  I always have at least two loaded guns available within seconds.

I live in peace and without fear.

I won't even set foot in a big city unless I must.

...continuing p*ssification of America...

As Mark Steyn says, we live in the Gelded Age

www.ocregister.com/.../government-mustangs-horses-2497628-million-wild

How can you have a home without a gun?

Seriously though, every home should have a hammer, a screwdriver of each type, a pair of pliers, and a gun of some kind. Period. End of story.

As another guy who had guns in the house growing up, I knew how to handle a gun by the time I was 10, so there was no real allure to me as I got older.

One other thing I think kept me from messing with Dad's guns; he made it very clear to me what would happen to me if he caught me screwing around. I would be hating life for good, long while.

And just to remove any ambiguity and illustrate one other thing that has changed in the last 25 years; I am talking about him tanning my backside until I couldn't sit down.

My Dad was a great guy; soft spoken; easy to like. But he was also a farm boy, who spent his whole life as a diesel mechanic ( forearms like Popeye), so I never doubted that he could whip my a$$ anytime he wanted. I never pushed far enough to find out and I respected him enormously.

Once upon a time, guns were viewed as just another tool. If you disrespect an axe, you'll end up just as dead. People don't get shot accidentally or on purpose at a higher rate today. Read late 19th century obituaries and you'll see that people (and children) regularly ended up dead. Think firing loaded guns in the air on 4th of July. Or just recall that Gen. Petraus was accidentally shot on a live fire exercise... by the best trained, most disciplined gun wielders around. If enough loaded guns are handled often enough, someone will get injured. Chain saw accidents happen, too.

What has changed is that guns are no longer a necessary tool in most parts of the country. As such, our tolerance for the accidents that go along with them has fallen.

As another guy who had guns in the house growing up, I knew how to handle a gun by the time I was 10, so there was no real allure to me as I got older.

One other thing I think kept me from messing with Dad's guns; he made it very clear to me what would happen to me if he caught me screwing around. I would be hating life for good, long while.

And just to remove any ambiguity and illustrate one other thing that has changed in the last 25 years; I am talking about him tanning my backside until I couldn't sit down.

My Dad was a great guy; soft spoken; easy to like. But he was also a farm boy, who spent his whole life as a diesel mechanic ( forearms like Popeye), so I never doubted that he could whip my a$$ anytime he wanted. I never pushed far enough to find out and I respected him enormously.

I have no idea how I wound up at this post, but the guns on the wall? The upper one is either a Marlin or a Winchester, can't say whether it's a .22 or larger caliber as they all look pretty much the same. These days it would almost be considered an "Assault Weapon", since the magazine under the barrel holds quite a number of shots. The lower one is a pellet gun; an air rifle. Single shot, but the kind that is quite a bit more potent than the Red Ryder BB gun we all had as EIGHT YEAR OLD BOYS back in those days.

I agree with comment by Mike, but I'll add in bad parenting, latch-key kids, and the always increasing control of government as factors that have destroyed personal responsibility.

My high school had a rifle team, and on meet days or practice days kids would be on the school bus with their rifles.  Nobody thought anything of it.  1959, Hillside NJ (near NYC).

<a href="www.flickr.com/.../a> from yearbook.

Things have changed.  In the mid 1980s kids at my high school in Iowa use to keep their shotguns in their lockers.  Our high school was at the edge of town.  On the other side of the soccer field was prime pheasant hunting.  After school they would go out and hunt.  The idea that anyone would use a shotgun for anything other hand hunting never occurred to us.

So what's different?

Information and our access and exposure to it.

Consider yourself and how you describe yourself on this blog: "A working mom embraces life with four busy kids and a continually buzzing Blackberry."  Did we have Blackberry's 25 years ago? Mobile phones? Did we have an Internet? Cable TV was just starting up... heck, VCR's were just becoming popular and common-place in the home.

Has the world really changed that much? I don't think so. What's really changed is that we're able to see more, hear more, learn more, and be exposed to so much more. We have access and exposure to events from around the world as they are happening (e.g. the Iran protests and Twitter). Consider what the power of that Blackberry puts in the palm of your hand, wherever you are, whenever you are. Did you have such power and access to information 25 years ago?

So any time someone halfway around the world sneezes, we hear about it. 24/7 "news" networks that need to fill broadcast time with something (remember when news was only a single half-hour show in the evenings?), and they're going to fill it with what gets ratings. Sadly, stories of fuzzy kittens don't get ratings, but stories of death and tragedy do. But again, this is nothing different... humanity has pretty much always been this way (those ancient Romans sure loved to watch violent "competition" in their Colosseum).

Fear sells. All living things have a will to survive, and what helps drive that is fear... being aware of what's out there that's dangerous and could affect our survival. So we tune in to learn about dangerous things... people being killed and what causes them to be killed. For whatever reason, guns are disproportionally targeted (guns apparently kill people, but when it's a drunk driver that kills someone we don't blame the SUV)... probably because guns have a somewhat straightforward and limited application, and there's great power in that application. So, it scares some people.

But consider... even today there are thousands upon thousands of good, responsible young people out there. Why don't we hear about them? Because good stuff doesn't sell. That doesn't mean they don't exist.

I'll continue the questioning. You would never have unlocked guns in your house. Why not? What exactly are you afraid of? The gun itself won't spring to life and hurt you. If you're worried about someone accessing the gun, do you not trust your own children? Are you not raising them to be responsible? Are you unwilling to teach them (or let them learn) how to be safe with guns? The NRA has many programs to help people learn how to be safe with guns, from the Eddie Eagle program on up to youth shooting sports. Kathy Jackon's Cornered Cat has a lot of good stuff too: http://www.corneredcat.com/

If you wouldn't be comfortable with your children being at a friend's house with a gun on the wall... why are you allowing your child to be around that person in the first place? Either you trust this other child and their family, or you don't. If you kinda trust them somewhat maybe... regardless of guns, why are you allowing your children to be with anyone that has less than 100% of your trust in the first place? Then if they have 100% of your trust, what are you concerned about?

My point is, much of this is in your head, and you seem to understand that and are trying to come to terms with it. Our world isn't as horrible a place as the news media makes it out to be. If you don't believe me, try shutting off the Blackberry and ignoring the media for about 6 months... you'll be amazed at how beautiful the world becomes. And in reality, it's always been that beautiful. :-)

My son started out with a Daisy Red Ryder BB Gun when he was six. That same year I bought him a Crickett .22 single-shot, bolt action rifle with a scope. Within a month, he was hitting a 3" spinner at 75m as regular as clockwork. Today, he is eight and has since moved on to other interests. He still shoots with me at the range sometimes, but guns are no big deal to him. They are just something else around the house, like his basketball or his bike.

In my household, nothing has changed from the "good old days".

In the late Seventies, we (10 to 12 of us) would take our shotguns to school and go dove hunting after football practice, I was 15 and 16.

In middle school, I had a single shot 22 target rifle in my bedroom at all times, I was on a rifle team at 12 years old, all the kids in the neighborhood had firearms in their bedrooms, so did all the parents.

Guns weren't evil, but some people were, that's how we were taught. We were taught discipline in school and church, all the mothers and fathers were our temporary parents and they all dished out justice accordingly and immediately, equally to all.

We also had MALE teachers and coaches and other respected MEN visible in the community, MEN who had been to war and back, MEN who knew how to make MEN and lead them, and would not put up with the foolishness and criminality we see too much of today.

My son, age 17, owns 8 longarms and 4 handguns.  He is a typical, lunkheaded goof about all aspects of life except sexual reproduction and weapons handling.  He is, from age 4 and forward a responsible gun using, gun owning, and (if need be) gun toting member of this great republic.  No quibbling, no misunderstanding of the importance or the difference between gun owning and other odious civic duties.  I fired weapons at age 4, he did, and is a good, decent person able to know the difference between a real gun and a paintball marker.

My father bought me a single-shot .410 shotgun at age eight.

I bought a 12 gauge Win. Model 12 at age 13. My earned money. Mail-ordered. (now you know I'm 66). Guns were "food tools" to my depression-era father. He wasn't a "gun person". But, he expected "one shot-one kill" for the table.

The different info from "above posts" is this.

You have a whole different attitude about guns when you have shot and killed an animal. And cleaned it for your mother to cook for the family to eat.

Picking up a still warm and bloody rabbit that just finished its dead-throes, and was alive and moving just seconds ago gives you a LOT of respect for the power of guns.

And, "preparing" it for food is a LOT different than picking steak or prepared chicken breasts out the supermarket cooler.

It's this "real reality" element that is missing from movies, TV, and especially video games.

And, far too many people look down on hunting and fishing folks as "backward". While enjoying eating grilled slaughterhouse products.

Last year I attended a college football game with my daughter and her best friend.  I was sitting next to one of my best friends on my left while she and her friend were sitting to my right playing a game on her cell phone.

My friend asked, "Is that a Nintendo or a cell phone."

I replied, "It's a cell phone."

"Hold old is your daughter?" he asked.

"Ten," I replied.

He considered that for a moment and said, "I can't believe your 10 year old has a cell phone."

I said, "To keep things in perspective, when I was her age I had a gun."

Times change.  I have guns now, but locked up and I would never think of allowing my daughter to have unfettered access to them.  But we live in a city and are assaulted by gun violence news every day.  I grew up in a very small rural town and if you didn't have a gun and know how to use it, you were an outlier.

When I was 12 or 13 I used to be able to walk down to the hardware store and ask for 300 rounds of 22 long and the storekeeper wouldn't blink an eye.  This was in the early '70s.  Today, kids can't even buy spray paint.

I think part of the difference is also this: the indiscriminate use of the gun has become the norm in the gangsta rite of passage. Not only are those gun handlers untrained and unlicensed, but they view the gun as a predatorial rather than defensive tool. They have no respect for the damage that can be done with it for they view it as the means to personal power. Worse yet, they buy black market guns that are either stolen, tossed and found, or have bodies on them. For the gangstas amongst us, learning to use the gun properly is not as important as shooting it without regard for who gets killed and as being feared for possessing it.

I think, but haven't done the research, that a lot of the accidental shootings occur around people who do not or have not learned to respect the gun.

The accumulation of Brady, drive-bys, Columbine, zero tolerance, p*ssification of America, embrace of gangsta culture, ignorance of the Second Amendment have all negatively affected our attitudes to guns.

The horror of carrying the ever useful and necessary pocket knife, be it swiss army or barlow, my kids still want to know why I carry one today. As to guns, I grew up loading a Jeep Wagoneer with my dad's inventory for trips to gun shows throughout the country. We grew up shooting from about the age of 11 on, can't figure the amount of ammo we burned up over the years but it was a lot.  mpw

Phesant season was a big deal when I was growing up.  It usually started in October when sunlight was growing short and hunting time after school was at a premium.  Our solution, bring our shotguns to school and store them in our lockers.  Can you imagine the reaction today?  

We have lost a culture where men understand their place as protectors of the weak and the family.  It's hard to explain unless you have watched it unfold.  Yet, it is true, none the less.

I remember when I was in High School and they were starting to bring the hammer down (so to speak).  There was a morning announcement:  

"While we recognize that deer season has started, please do not leave you guns visible in you gun racks, store them behind your seat."

I've puzzled over this myself, although I was thinking more about how guns were commonplace back in the days when people needed them for hunting and protection and no one seemed to worry about them being in the house with little kids.

When I was in first grade, the ten-year-old brother of a classmate was killed in a gun accident at home.  These things have always happened.  Kids were killed in car accidents too, and lots of people didn't buckle up.  I think we are just more aware of danger now--maybe it is the media like many are saying.  I think when we are constantly exposed to all the horrible things happening in the world, so many of which we can do nothing about, we feel compelled to clamp down and take control of whatever we CAN do to feel safer.

All that said, no guns are allowed in my home--my boys just have a collections of swords. :-)

Suburbs of Salt Lake City, early 80's...

We used to have shotguns in our trucks and go pheasant hunting at lunch. Sometimes a teacher or two would join us. No big thing.  I recall a teacher brought a rifle to school to show me because he and I were both interested in that type of rifle.

Lots of new rules. But less safety. Imagine that!

What changed?  The biggest cause has to be the idiotic war on drugs. I don't know why people idolize Reagan. He did a lot of stupid things, like the "war on drugs" and was really just a speed bump on the way to (just 20 years later) maternal socialism.

I lock our arsenal up now because our house is always full of visiting kids that have no experience or knowledge of them.

I have no idea how I came across your blog just now, but what a great picture. I remember about 25 years ago, I took a trip on the Amtrak to go up to northern California to visit my grandfather. He lived out in the country, so I took my little .22 rifle along - my folks dropped me off at the train station, with my gun, and I just walked up onto the train with it, put it in the luggage rack, and away we went. When I got to my grandfather's house, I'd ride his old ten-speed bicycle, rifle strapped to the little metal rack on the back, out to his land where I'd spend the day shooting at rabbits and then bicycle back home when it started to get dark. Those were the days I guess, when nobody would blink an eye at a little kid riding his bicycle on the side of the highway with a rifle bungee-corded on the back.

Of course, those were the days when kids were expected to learn how to be responsible "young men" at an early age. I guess it's quite a contrast to the 30-40 year old perma-children we seem to be plagued with today.

Hey DanP_from_AZ:

Great story, but you left out a fun part of it - how much did the mail-order .12 cost?

From the National Safety Council:  Gun <i>accidents</I> are at their lowest rate per 100,000 ever and have been the same (to a statistically insignificant difference) for the past twenty years.  The LOWEST rate ever.  Let me make that clear:  LOWEST.

Accidents do not include gross negligence such as gang members playing Russian Roulette, young men pointing an "empty" gun at Bobby's head and blowing his brains out or homeboys shooting at an enemy and hitting a bystander two blocks away (that's manslaughter at the least).  Those are not accidents they are deliberate reckless actions.  

Neither, although the anti-gun groups always include them in order to inflate the numbers, are suicides.  No one, not even a teenager, puts a loaded gun in their mouth and pulls the trigger without knowing exactly what is going to happen.  Take the gun away (and do nothing else) and they'll wind up just as dead the next day by some other method.  Guns don't cause suicide, untreated depression does.

Count straight accidents, as we do with cars, and the rate is the LOWEST ever.  FACT!  

Here's an idea... maybe you've totally infantilized your teenage boys.  There's nothing biologically different with teen boys now and teen boys from 1980, or 1780 for that matter.  The difference is parents, not the children.

I've read about a parental "conservation of worry" effect.

Apparently, we parents (especially mothers) biologically programmed to worry about our kids a certain amount.

Many "bigger" dangers are no longer around us.  We no longer worry about our kids being eaten, starving, dying of plague, kidnapped by an invading army or traveling slavers, or a host of things that our ancestors dealt with.

So our brains, without realizing why, find new things to worry about.

(This does not mean the issues now "on the brain" are unimportant.  It's well worth the time and money to lock guns and use infant car seats.  The main point is our grandparents and parents used to worry about the kids about as much as we do, even though their worries and situations were so different.)

I was born in 1959.  I am sad to say that the problem is that baby boomers are made of weak stuff.  Our parents were somewhat naive about drugs and we thought that meant they didn't know anything.  Baby boomers have been pretencious fools who have faked half of their accomplishments and have done a poor job of raising children.  The emphasis on being the child's friend and protecting them from every danger has led to a generation of pasty faced overweight emasculated sissies for kids.  An interesting statistic is while GPAs have been going up SAT scores have been falling.

This is by design of TPTB; Eloi are easier to govern.

The rights and duties of adulthood, particularly

the right to own weapons and use deadly force,

have been deliberately demonized.

A question for the doubtful: Exactly when did military

officers stop wearing weapons with their uniforms ?

Simple: death of the patriarchy. If wives have contempt for their husbands, kids will have contempt for both, and run amok. I'm the same age, and while my parents were good Massachusetts liberals who wouldn't let me have guns, I had knives, throwing stars and a compound bow. I also had numerous friends with guns on the wall, just like you see. We didn't cause problems with our weapons because our dads would beat the crap out of us if we did. We were raised properly. Now if dad beat the crap out of his gun-nut kid, for crying out loud, if the kid didn't shoot him, the police would toss him in jail.

Society is built on the family unit. Kick out the props to the family: golly, big surprise nothing works any more. Go read some Theodore Dalrymple to see how this has played out in England, and know that is the future your children will face. Enjoy feminism while it lasts; it won't last.

Hi NWI,

This will REALLY date me. A $92 money order included postage. In 1956. A plain bottom of the line Win. Model 12, 30 inch barrel full choke.

I have my Dad's Win. Model 1897 and my Great-Uncle's Rem. Model 31 shotguns. The 1897 and the 1931 were free after they died. Real steel, real wood, real good family memories.

OK, I'm a gun nut. I added the "right-wing" prefix late, about age 50. Slow-learner. {:^)

Oops, I'm hi-jacking another thread. A very bad habit of mine.

The pansification of the American populace seems to be proceeding on schedule. A relentless barrage of propaganda will eventually cause the "man in the street" to be afraid of his own shadow, cowed by threats large (nukes, ecological doom of one sort or another, etc) and small (chemicals in food, radon hiding out in the basement, guns, blah blah). He will, according to plan, sit around and grouse, waiting for an all-seeing government to protect him with a blizzard of laws and a straitjacket of regulations.

Is this fantasy, or is it a real and genuine slippery slope, with a totally passive populace, interested in little beyond bread and circuses, lurking at the bottom? And if real, is it a deliberate programme, or is it just part of the normal and gradual decline invariably suffered by liberal societies? Or is it perhaps a real plot, but more limited -- such as the apparent effort to turn noisy pre-teenage boys into, effectively, good little pre-teenaged girls?

What changed? Personal responsibility and allowing parents to be parents. Once upon a time children were taught what it took to be adults, and adults were allowed to do the teaching, even if that meant a few well aimed smacks to the backside.

We have allowed other folks to make us afraid of so very much! As one poster noted kids can't even buy spray paint anymore. The word teenager didn't exist until only the last several decades, we encourage as a culture, young people to be children for many years past when they should. George Washington was a surveyor entrusted with surveying most of Virginia at age 18, one can be sure he had a gun with him and used it well. Andrew Jackson was a soldier at age 12, David Farragut was on a Navy Ship at the age of 10, during the War of 1812 at the age of 12 he captured a British warship, when the Captain of the British vessel found out the age of the boy he threatened to come up topside, Farragut let him know he would gladly shot him if he did. This man became a Navy Commander during the Civil War, capturing New Orleans. He became the first 4 star Naval Admiral in the country.

For the "Progressives" to be able to take over and run your life you must be fearful to live that life with the inherent risks that entails. There is a constant drumbeat of all the things you should be fearful of while at the same time the message is if you just give up a bit more personal responsibility and control over your life "we" will make it better for you. It is fear that has made the difference and that fear has lead to gelding our young men.

My two sons had BB guns by age 8, and were hunting with 410's the first year at 13 to graduate to various other guns within a couple years. We have a total of 14 guns in the home I believe, and none are locked up or will be. Any child I can't trust to be around them can't be trusted in my home period. The other thing I did with the younger one that I wish I had done with all my kids was to take him out of public school, we opted out of the biggest brain washing of young people there is. Not to mention I can do a better job of teaching while teaching my son how to actually learn instead of parrot.

Fear and using that fear to produce girly boys instead of manly men. I want my boys to be men and as a mother I made a conscious choice to ensure that could happen.

I blame divorce for the loss of our youth gun culture: the missing ingredient Ms. Granju struggles line after line to figure out is the father.

Go back and re-read all the reminiscences: "father" here, "grandfather" there, but no memories of Mom blazing a tribute to Annie Oakley down at the local range.  It's Dad who teaches you to handle firearms.

I had a rack full of guns when I was a kid, but I mostly lived with Dad, so of course I had a rack full of guns.

When I lived with Mom I had my model ships on the wall (the sailing kind) but no guns.

Dad taught me gun safety like it was riding a bike or learning to swim.  No big deal.

Mom, for her entire life up to this point, has never even picked up a firearm, let alone thought to teach me to use one.

So here's a question:

Did anyone here who never had their father in the home growing up own and learn to handle firearms as a kid?

By way of background, I am a retired lawyer, Marine Corps veteran and lifetime shooter, competitor, collector, and of course, Second Amendment activist.  I am a club officer in a major gun club--my children are NRA life members.

I own a lot of guns. I know a lot about guns.  My children, grown now, are the same way.  But when they were growing up, none of those 75-odd pieces was accessible to them or their friends.  Safes, locked compartments, bolts locked separately from weapons--one way of another, everything was safe.  When my carry piece was out of the holster, it was trigger-locked.  

It does no good to bemoan the indiscipline which makes these precautions necessary.  All the foregoing comments of nostalgic mourning for easy acceptance of ubiquitous firearms are correct; they are also irrelevant.  We live in the would as it is, not as we would wish it to be.lik

Wow. I read Babble everyday and these comments were totally unexpected---until I realized Instapundit had linked to this post. The world makes sense once more.

Coming from a younger perspective (20), my father and mother always had guns in the house when I was growing up. None of my friend's parents had guns, but my parents were military, so it made sense to me. They didn't teach any of us kids how to shoot and they made it quite clear that the gun was off limits.

When I was in my teens my Dad took the family to a gun show that happened to be in town. He was horrified to realize I was hesitant to touch any of the guns and felt really uncomfortable being around them. He promptly gave all five of us shooting and safety lessons. Personally, I regret that he didn't teach us about guns at a much younger age...and I know he does as well.

The demonization of fire-arms, and the subsequent fear of them, is so pervasive that the only sure way to cut through it is personal experience.

Browning's comments on this string are insightful. We live in a disgusting "celebrity" culture. Kids and especially inner city kids are always striving to "grow up" an have "cred" in the absence of adult supervision, adult expectations and the loving but careful and costly supervision of parents and community the misunderstandings of what costitutes adulthood is not surprising. And it's not all that surprising to me that mechanical devices are the target of the facile plantiffs like shameless politicians who want to destroy freedom in the name of it. Gangsta culture is admired by rudderless and unsupervised kids today the same we we admired the relatively harmeless ducktailed, switchbladed punks of my teen era. It has little to do with guns, everything to do with the subduction of classic social control and sense of belonging of kids, plus their formal induction into adult society. This stupid glorification of the "celebrity" culture is promoted by infantile adults themselves, parents who are frank idiots, protected from the consequences of their own actions by racketeering senators and congressmen and women. Why? because minstering to the sad circumstances of corrupted life is a major political industry. Money, money, money.

Anyway, it is the kids who suffer the consequences, and I am heartend that so many of them show more judgement and introspection than their whiney, carping miserable parents, and find, as is always the case, refuge in their own society. They know the problem isn't really guns, it's the absolute failure of their parents, who should never be trusted with power, not at 300 yards, in a schoolyard, or in the marktplace, those miserable, excuse-making, stupid  failures.

The demonization of firearms owners estranges the only sector of society who can relied upon to step forward to protect society from crime or terrorism.  Many of these people do not register their weapons because they have the reasonable fear that they would simply be putting themselves on a list for eventual confiscation.  Will these people step forward to protect a stranger being victimized, knowing they may be prosecuted themselves?  These attitudes that demonize firearms make us all less safe  --  remember, firearms protect us even if we are not armed, so long as a criminal thinks we might be.  

Firearms accidents are a straw man, trivial compared to automobiles and alcohol.  Motorcycles and chainsaws and space heaters and pots of hot water on a stove are dangerous.  Water sports are dangerous. Drugs ruin vastly more lives than firearms, but progressive thought wants them made more legal.  AIDS is more devastating than firearms accidents.  An accidental death is a tragedy to the individuals involved; it is not a social problem.  Liberals and progressives like to spin individual tragedies into social problems that need policy solutions.  They have been doing this for over a hundred years and it has invariably come out badly.

Everyone I knew growing up had guns. Really. Not only that, but I knew where everyone's dad kept his guns. It wasn't a big deal because we had all been taught two things.

1) Guns aren't a toy

2) Treat every gun as it is loaded

I got my .22 just before my 10th birthday, and shooting was a frequent activity when friends would come visit. There were never any problems.

The problem, frankly, is YOU.  To be more precise, the attitudes and values of people like you who have uncritically bought into

1) the anti-gun meme specifically,

2) valuing absolute safety / security above freedom, liberty, responsibility (with its inherent risks) and

3) the perception of humans as inherently irresponsible and in need of lifelong coddling (by parents, others, the state)

What's changed in society is that enough people like you have risen to influence, that they are succeeding in altering the rules and values of society at large. Because these new values are contrary to human nature and reality, they create the breeding grounds for things like Columbine, which is the poster child for your emotional fear of guns in the home.

Columbine-type events did not occur 100 years ago because society's values, widely exemplified in families, did NOT coddle youngsters, but strove to make them responsible, accountable, mature members of society at an early age.  Probably like your own childhood experience.  Economic circumstances drove that - coddling simply was unaffordable. Did you ever ask your parents why they trusted you kids like that?  What values lurked behind their decision?

Today our economic abundance and "no-fault" ethics ENCOURAGE coddling of our youth, who then shirk responsibility and maturity with predictable results.  It's self-fulfilling.  And you are enabling it.

You need to find a quiet place, dedicate a good chunk of time and critically think through your values, priorities, and assumptions about human nature.  Get a trusted friend to help you.  Go back to your childhood and reflect on your parents' values.  Your attitude about guns in the home is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction within you. You are out of touch with some fundamental truths. Sadly this is all too prevalent in society today.  Fortunately you are asking good questions, and you seem to have the right upbringing; you can get there with a little effort.  That's more than I can say for a lot of folks these days...  Good luck!

I don't know much about guns in homes (not part of my childhood then, nor of my parenting now), but thinking about it brings to mind what I think is a related point about bullying, and how that has changed from the 60s/70s to today.

A generation ago, the kids with anger/impulse issues were afraid of their parents.  We, in turn, were of course afraid of them, but we knew that there were limits that they would not cross, limits that fell far short of gun violence, because their parents would beat them severely if they did anything more than the low-scale violence that establishes their position at the top of the pecking order.

Today's most worrisome kids either have no father at home, or have a father who for whatever reason does not beat his overly aggressive son (or daughter).  The kids, in turn, are much more daring - they have no limits.

So my speculation on what has changed with respect to kids and guns is that we no longer trust the worst of the kids to regulate themselves, because we wonder whether they are accountable to any authority whatsoever.  Not being able to intrude only in their homes to keep guns away from them, we choose to intrude in all homes and keep guns away from all children (and perhaps some day all adults, too).

I guess Dan P and I are the old folks here. I first fired my brother's shotgun in 1948, when I was 7 years old. I inherited that gun (he went off to Korea) at 12, got my first .22 rifle at 14, and a beautiful Enfield .303 British (mail order) at 16. Every year for "Western Day" in high school I wore a Colt Bisley model .38-40 single six on my hip, and there were at least two dozen others wearing some kind of older revolver in our school of 300 students.

My nephew has the Colt, and I still have those long guns plus several others purchased over time. I also have some handguns, and my Concealed Handgun Licence, and a firm commitment not to loose my right to keep any of them.

It is not just sons.  I have three daughters and one son.  I made a conscious decision to teach them all about guns as they grew up.  The girls are crack shots as is my son.  I didn't want the girls, especially, growing up afraid of anyone or anything.  I didn't see this as reactionary, only realistic and part of my duty as a parent.  

One of my daughters is now in law school at NYU.  They recently studied a case dealing with a person getting hit by shot gun pellets.  Very few of the other kids in the class knew the difference between shot gun pellets and bullets.  It was foreign to them.  This is disturbing to me.  Such as these will be our society's future leaders.

My brother used to go to school with a rifle or shotgun (I'm not sure what he had)in his pickup truck so he and his friends could go straight to the woods during hunting season. That way, they wasted no time and camped out all weekend. (He graduated back in 1988.)

No one went crazy over the scene of half a dozen or more pick ups in the school parking lot with guns in the gun racks. Or for that matter, knives for taking care of the game that was scored (or what other usages you would need a knife for). Nothing was hidden.  

We watch some of the Columbine coverage together. He shook his head and told me that would never have happen at our old high school back in the day. The guys with the guns would have walked out to the parking lot, come back with the firearms and taken care of business. The biggest commotion would have been over who had the "clear shot".

One main thing that has changed is people inaccurate perceptions and media fueled inability to accurately assess danger.  For example stranger abductions are no higher than ever, and yet parents fear to let their kids out of their sight, never mind their yard. (A study in England found that with each passing generation, the distance an 8 year old was allowed to travel from home shrank from 5 miles in 1900 to "across the street" in 2005.)

Gun ownership is way, way up, and accidents are way way, down, which can only partially be accounted for by locking the gun cases. As teens, gun cases were locked, but that was to keep the little kids out of them. As teenagers, we had access to the keys, with the dire understanding of our responsibility should we elect to use them. Most of my friends also had their own rifles, locked to racks in their rooms.

Your root question, "what has changed" with respect to the issue of individual responsibility and freedom is a lot more pressing than most folks would believe.

The culture has changed, we went from the melting pot where everyone shared the same values to multi-culturalism where everyone has different ideas, some cultures don't do guns and knives well.  

I grew up in norther California not to far from SF where guns  were plentiful and like above Jr high guys wore buck knives to school, the area started changing about that time with people that were "not locals" started moving in, that's when In high school I saw someone pull a knife on someone else.  

I think I even remember thinking at that time, "well looks like the rules have changed", none of the guys I knew would have broke that rule, but it was obvious times were a changing.

And boy did they change, with the population change, more rules had to be implemented to "protect the children".  

Ohh well innocence lost. Welcome to the real world.

Hey, Richard from Houston:

I'm got a real laugh out of your story about your daughter and the folks in NY not understanding the difference between pellets and bullets! I lived in NYC for a number of years, and here's a real conversation I had with a co-worker one day:

Him: "Do you still do any hunting?"

Me: "I used to love bird hunting, but don't do much now."

Him: "It's got to be really hard to shoot a bird..."

Me: "Uh, what do you mean?"

Him: "I mean, hitting a moving bird with a bullet!"

Me: "Sigh..."

Katie, what changed for YOU. Was it indoctrination that guns are BAD that made you change your mind? I mean really, you grew up in a house like yours and now that lifestyle is so wrong?

Disagreeing with Kristo up above.  We were daring.  My friends and I joke about all of the stuff that we did and have lived to tell the tale.  Meanwhile, their kids aren't allowed to walk to school by themselves until they are 14.

This says there is a lack of trust and respect in the way we raise children today.  We don't trust our children and our kids don't respect their parents.

As someone above said, he didn't do some things because if he did, he knew he would be good and sorry for a long time.  I am not an advocate of corporal punishment per se, but the 5 or so times I rec'd a spanking (4 or 5 swats on my behind) and just being afraid of disappointing my parents stopped my from doing things that were either bad for me, other kids or would cause embarrassment. Also, I never rec'd a spanking from the parents of friends, but if I let them down, and they told me they were ashamed of me for my actions (such as jumping on the furniture), I was DEVASTATED because I respected adults.

Therefore, because you respected adults, you respected their instructions on safe gun use.  I think it's as simple as that.

Columbine was just as much a mass murder of students as it was of the truth.  All of the commennts here show that Columbine is known for how many students were shot, yet Klebold and Harris also threw 76 bombs, of which 30 exploded.  They even set up a small fire bomb in a field half a mile away from the school to divert the aurhorities.  Furthermore, they boobytrapped the bodies of some of the dead with bombs.  

I even recall that some advocates of gun bans mention Columbine in their appeal to reinstate the so-called "assault weapon" ban.  One said that had these weapons been banned, none of these children would have died.  This despite the fact that of the 4 firearms carried by Klebold and Harris, only one was covered by the ban.

While Columbine does affect the attitude of parents towards the issue of youths and firearms it is far more based on the way the post-Columbine media has found the event to be useful and far less on how sick and dangerous these two teens really were, and how their respective parents really failed to do their job of supervising them and giving them a healthy moral upbringing.

I agree with all that has been said, including the statistics that gun deaths per ca pita have actually decreased. But I will add that a teenage boy is not the same today as they were 25, 100, 200 years ago. Why? What we eat has changed dramatically. The amount of sugar in the diet alone has skyrocketed at the same time healthy saturated fat consumption has plummeted. These two foods alone have had a deleterious effect on mental health and cognitive ability.

The comments about violence on the idiot box (tv) and violent video games just do not jive.  Look to history... WWII real world violence against real people was portrayed as desirable, Korean war same thing Vietnam... we were treated to very real news footage every night on the evening news... there was no increase in violence tagged to it. BUT come POST Vietnam era  violence starts to rise... what happened? Some feel good idiots came out and told the world it's OK to blame everything on someone else and throw off your need for PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY!!! The "I'm violent because I'm a victim" era began. And the excuses lead to lifestyles that lead to more excuses and it just avalanched out of control. NOW we have big government trying to tell us how to live  how to think and what to do at every moment of the day, all because people don't want to be responsible for themselves. It isn't the diet, it"s the lack of discipline, heaven forbid  we spank our children and damage their self esteem... Hate to tell you this folks, but even Dr. Spock recanted this after his own kids turned out bad... Here the fact is used properly  corporal punishment only needs to be used  a few times and after that the threat of it does the work.

THIS is why teenage boys could grow up with guns on their walls without problems as late as the 80's. My daughters? they have guns on THEIR walls, not locked up in my gun safes (yes plural, I am a federally licensed firearms collector, they shoot them clean them and treat them with respect. My oldest daughter is 17 and my youngest is 11. Knowledge is power and they know how to safely use their firearms, and what would happen if they were to misuse them, just as I knew when I was their age, and had my guns hanging on MY bedroom wall.

Clearly you do not trust your own children.  And that's the difference.  Your parents apparently trusted their children with responsibility - perhaps because they had more confidence in the job they'd done raising them.

So the pointer is towards your failure as a parent or towards your children as poor learners.  You either didn't do a good job of raising your kids - or you don't believe they've absorbed the lessons.  

One other possibility: You're just paranoid and hyper-protective (in a way that will cripple your children - see "Helicopter Parents")

My BF's dad was a police officer, so he grew up on a house with numerous loaded guns. He had a BB gun when he was 7, and earned his certification in gun safety when he was older.

I told him about this article, and he thinks the difference between then and now is the culture of single mom heads of households. He believes the lack of a father's involvement has contributed to our gun paranoia culture.

Back in the day...   I'm 51 now... born in 1958.

From about the 2nd grade, I always had a pocketknife with me.  School...  church...  chores...   family dinner, even family dinner out.  It was the all-purpose tool before Tim Leatherman got his together.  We whittled, carved, cut string, put our initials on trees, opened letters and even occasionally did something that left a lasting scar on our own hands.

The focus wasn't on the tool:  it was on the weilder of the tool.  Being a man (or becoming one) was about learning to use the tools available:  gun, axe, hammer, saw, chisel, wrench or even a pencil.  Most pickup trucks had gun-racks in the back window.  They were commonplace, understood, and respected.  Of course, we lived on acreage and hunted, too.  Venison was on the table almost as much as beef or chicken, which we raised ourselves.

We lived near a town of 20,000...  and even the city boys had dads and uncles who took them out fishing, hunting, and target shooting, developing skills that last.  It was about learing the skill; about self-improvement.  The advanced woodshop class of my middle school made new rifle stocks for their hand-me-down guns:  a string was run through the barrel and knotted to prevent use and be a visual note that the gun was made "safe".

Today, most of our society has never held, much less fired a rifle or pistol.  Many youngsters in the inner cities often have few good male role models, and emulate one another rather than a respected elder who has developed some level of wisdom based on maturity and experience.  Broken families and children born outside a commited family contribute to this...   and we call it a victimless crime.

The gun has become something to fear, because the average citizen doesn't have a way to use it safely even if he owns one.  Try and find a gun range in most cities today.  Regulations and insurance have driven the cost up so high that many couldn't afford to shoot even a .22.

There is an innate fear of that which we don't understand, especially something capable of killing, but think for a moment about our cars.  They are as fully capable of causing death as any firearm, and we willingly turn the keys and control over to 16-year old "children" every day.

We have, however, given them lessons...  been with them as they've learned to control the power of the car...   seen understanding in their eyes as they react to pedestrians and come to realize that they have the power to kill in their control.

Our fear of guns is all in our heads...  our rational minds should be able to see this, but like all things learned, is best learned by doing.  It is too bad we have given up our freedoms and taken on fear about guns.

I guess I'm one of the younger posters here...I'm 25, born and raised in a farming/hunting community. My father kept his guns in a locked gun cabinet and taught my brother and I how to load and shoot them by the time we were 8. We were only allowed to use the guns under his supervision and he was the only one that know where the key was hidden for the cabinet. I've never been uncomfortable around guns, just kind of lost interest.

Respect for guns and what they are meant to do(kill deer and other game for human consumption) is a lesson that can be learned at a very young age. Once you know what a gun is capable of, you're less likely to be stupid with it.

I am copying this over from another site that had a comment about this blog. This is not my writing but its good.

"I got my first deadly, high-powered weapon at the age of 16. I remember the thrill of the power as I ran my hands over the sleek lines and formed steel. I cleaned it lovingly and learned to keep the working parts appropriately lubricated.

Although I'd been using similar ones for many years, lesser tools with limited power, my parents felt that I had a proper respect for the capacity of that beautiful piece of machinery to injure or kill me or one of my friends... or an innocent bystander for that matter. I was taught the rules of safety. I was admonished to use it only in the proper prescribed locations or face losing the priveledge.

I loved that car. Did you think I meant a gun?

The gun? Had it since I was 14".

Media and our society has certainly played a large part to how guns are perceived as destructive in our environment.  There were many accidental gun deaths and shootings that have happened many years ago, but where did you find that information...only in the local newspaper and maybe on your local news station.  Today, there are many sources to view what is happening in the world in an instant.  The Internet, streaming video from every news station all over the world, newspapers, blogs, you name it.  So, of course we see an increase in these deaths.  We have immediate access to view stories as they are happening...the Columbine kid who was bleeding and hanging from a window...so of course those images are going to stick in your mind.  How about children TV...people are so quick to state that Spiderman, Transformers, Batman cause agression in children, mainly boys.  However, what were some of the shows way back when...how about Wile E. Coyote who dropped rocks from cliffs to kill the Roadrunner...how about Tom and Jerry?  Look at these shows...they are just as violent.  These images have always been around, it's the access to how much information we have these days that allows us to judge a family that owns guns. On a side note, I grew up with guns in the home (my father was a police officer).  As I had children, I was anti-guns and didn't want my child near them.  Now my husband is a police officer and as parents, we need to be responsible.  So, even though I am anti-guns, I learned to handle and properly shoot one, cause you have to view every gun as a loaded gun and be educated on how they work.

I agree with all the comments about changes in our culture, child-rearing philosophies, the media, etc.  I also think the current aversion to guns has to do with the exodus from rural/farming areas over the last couple of generations.  I grew up in a small town where everyone hunted and kids were expected to know how to use and respect guns.  When I had the chance to return to a small farming community a few years ago I was surprised to find a good number of kids being raised with the old-fashioned ways people are discussing here.  Things have gotten "softer" in the country, but not to the extent you find in suburban and city areas.  

In cities and suburbs there is certainly less of a need to carry a gun that is not meant to be used on another human being, so I can see why someone who has always lived in a populous area would have a very different view of guns and knives than I do.